ED MORRISSEY ON GAMERGATE.
I start off with these two lengthy and skeptical articles because Rhodes and Kain at least did something that the hundreds of gamers who piled into the chatroom complained that the rest of the gaming-journalism world refused to do: cover the topic seriously. Kain laments that the political-media world (myself explicitly included) got involved in this debate, but that may be because we were at least willing to have the debate. As Kain notes, when gamers tried having these debates in their usual channels such as Reddit and YouTube, they found their debates deleted and censored.
When thousands of gamers sit through an hour of unrelated political talk to watch a 51-year-old political blogger host a roundtable on GamerGate, then something is clearly dysfunctional with the media relationship to the community it covers. And while Kain argues with plenty of justification that I’m not part of that community, media condescension towards its audience looks very, very familiar to conservatives who engage the media that covers politics, complete down to the lecturing and assumptions of them based on the fringiest elements it can find. . . .
The cultural think pieces to which Auerbach refers are part of what Kain calls the “social justice warriors” who push political/cultural activism as part of their critical look at games and the industry. There is nothing illegitimate about cultural and artistic criticism in any art form; there’s been plenty of such analysis aimed at the film and television industries by all sorts of commentators, from feminists to family-values conservatives. The problem, at least as it’s been perceived by the gamers, is that the media covering the industry has taken sides, and has done so in large part because of undisclosed relationships between the journalists and their editors and the activists who want to make a point of finding misogyny in gaming culture, and to paint everyone in it with the same brush.
It would also help if the criticism was informed and accurate, not just in dealing with the gamers but also the art itself.
Journalists think they are our betters, and that they should improve us. In fact, they are often, it seems, not even capable of performing their own jobs.